What Is Content Strategy and How Can It Help My Business?
Whether your business uses blogs, email campaigns, social media marketing, paid ads, podcasts, YouTube videos, or a combination, it’s vital to have a cohesive content plan. With a well-organized content strategy, your marketing efforts have clear goals and a roadmap to achieve them, instead of simply throwing a bunch of copy at a wall and seeing what sticks.
But first, it’s important to understand what content strategy is and how it can help you reach your business goals.
Content Strategy 101
Content strategy includes the planning, copywriting, publication, and management of your company’s content marketing efforts. When planned and executed correctly, it can attract new customers and engage your target audience, helping you achieve your business goals while meeting your clients’ needs.
It’s crucial to lay out your goals, customer demographics and insights, types of content, and content marketing plans when developing your strategy. Content marketing agencies like Strandberg Media Services LLC can help, taking the reins to plan and execute content that drives revenue and attracts your desired audience.
Your strategy should specify the general point of your content, how it will help prospective customers meet their needs, how you should structure and organize it, and how to integrate it with your overall marketing plans. Without proper planning and execution, many businesses end up shouting into the void rather than broadcasting a well-thought-out message to highly targeted customer groups.
How can a holistic content plan help my business?
There are several key benefits to creating and following a carefully structured content strategy for your business. While the importance of each element can vary based on the type of business you run, most companies can benefit significantly in the following five ways.
1. Aligning Content with Goals
What’s the overall goal of the content you want to create for your business? Is it SEO content writing to improve your website’s search engine rankings? Or perhaps it’s educating your target audience about how your products or services can help them solve problems?
It’s vital to align your content plan with your company’s goals. Otherwise, you’ll waste time and money creating content that doesn’t provide value or, even worse, detracts from what you’re trying to do.
2. Driving Content Marketing Efforts
Your content strategy plays an integral role in your overall marketing plans. Content marketing can include corporate blogs, email campaigns, newsletters, social media, white papers, videos, and more. With a cohesive content strategy, you can determine which types of marketing to pursue and make sure all of these elements work together harmoniously.
Remember that your content plan is the driving force behind your marketing efforts. In most cases, this means it comes first — for instance, if you’re creating a new website, you should map out and execute the copywriting before handing the project over to your web designers. This helps your design team determine the ideal flow for the site and how to present the most important information to visitors.
3. Attracting New Leads and Generating Brand Awareness
Every company wants to drum up as much new business as it can. By creating a strong content strategy and executing it with top-notch SEO content writing, you can reach potential new customers in various ways.
Using local SEO can help you target people in specific geographical areas. Meanwhile, focusing on certain keywords and phrases can generate interest among potential customers in your chosen niche. Determine who you want to reach and how — then, stick to the plan.
4. Educating Prospective Customers
Another valuable aspect of content strategy is the ability to teach people about what your company does and how it can affect their lives. This can include educating prospective customers about a specific product or service, or it can be a more holistic approach that encompasses the overarching mission of your business.
The more people know about what your business does, the more interest they’ll have in making a purchase. This is an area where blog writing is a tremendous help. Regular blog posts detailing how your products and services work can go a long way toward securing new customers and retaining existing clients.
5. Analyzing and Optimizing Results
Finally, following your content plan like a roadmap helps you meaningfully analyze the results of your marketing efforts. If you stray too much from your content strategy, it’s more difficult to determine what’s working and what needs tweaking.
Continually reviewing your plan and optimizing its execution is one of the most valuable functions of reputable content marketing agencies like Strandberg Media Services. We can help you figure out the best ways to present your content and stay ahead of the curve before it starts to lose effectiveness.
Understanding the General Framework for Content Strategy
The core tenets of content marketing are planning, creation, and maintenance. That said, there’s plenty of overlap between these concepts and quite a bit of nuance regarding their execution. With that in mind, let’s discuss five vital aspects and how each affects the overall content plan.
1. Prioritizing Goals and Conducting Research
We’ve talked a bit about defining goals already, but one aspect we haven’t touched on is prioritizing them. Rank your goals by importance to determine which ones require urgent attention and which can spend some time on the back burner. This helps you make the most of limited resources and see quick results early in the process.
It’s also important to conduct target market research. Who is your target audience? What do they need? How can you help them achieve these goals? Answering these questions in a data-driven manner helps you refine your buyer personas and target the right demographics with your content.
2. Determining Content Topics and Keyword Strategies
Now that you know who your target audience is, it’s time to determine the best ways to grab their attention. Leverage keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner to plan topics that align with your goals. Figuring out which keywords to target is a crucial component of any modern company’s SEO content writing.
At Strandberg Media Services, we sometimes use SurferSEO to determine the ideal keyword volume for a given piece of content. This allows you to incorporate associated keywords to optimize the copy without overstuffing it with repetitive phrases that often hurt your SEO more than help it.
3. Determining Which Types of Content to Create
Figuring out what kind of content to create is almost as important as determining the topics and keywords. Content marketing encompasses copywriting — including blog writing, website copy, ebooks, social media posts, and more — along with other media like podcasts and YouTube videos.
This is another area where market research comes in handy. Determine which types of media your ideal customer uses and create content that aligns with their habits. If you create an audio podcast but your target audience favors video formats, your message might never reach them.
4. Selecting a Content Management System (CMS)
Choosing the right content management system (CMS) for your needs can be complex. In general, the decision comes down to a basic choice between a fully featured CMS platform and a website builder. The right choice for your business can depend on many unique factors.
If you want as much flexibility as possible, using a CMS platform like WordPress enables you to customize many aspects of your website and its presentation. On the other hand, these platforms typically have a high learning curve that can frustrate business owners and burn through resources — especially if your team is small and not especially tech-savvy.
On the other hand, a website builder is an easy-to-use alternative that streamlines site maintenance, design, and security in exchange for fewer customization options. Here at Strandberg Media Services, we use the Squarespace website builder because we don’t prioritize customization and advanced features as much as we prioritize ease of use and a straightforward setup.
5. Publishing and Managing Content
Your content strategy must consider making your efforts as timely and effective as possible. Even evergreen content isn’t as much of a “set it and forget it” process as you might think — continuously monitoring performance is vital.
It all starts with a content calendar that helps you create a balanced and diverse content library capable of capturing a variety of potential new customers. Once you publish each piece of content, revisit it periodically to make sure it’s performing as expected and still aligns with your goals. If not, revise it to make it more timely and effective.
Maximize your ROI with content strategy services from Strandberg Media Services.
If this all sounds too complicated or time-consuming to handle in-house, we can help! Strandberg Media Services has extensive experience handling all aspects of content strategy and execution. We can figure out what your company should publish and when, taking this responsibility off your shoulders and freeing you up to focus on growing your business.
Reach out today to learn more about how Strandberg Media Services can take your content marketing efforts to the next level!
